As if anticipating the BBC's current exodus from London to the north, the radio drama producer Tony Cliff, who has died aged 70, happily based himself in that region, first in Leeds, then in Manchester, where he became head of radio drama. He turned out a steady stream of memorable contributions to Saturday Night Theatre and other outlets, sometimes inviting direct comparison with the TV version of the same work. For example, The Forsyte Saga was aired to almost the same acclaim as that won by Donald Wilson's celebrated television serial of the late 1960s. Tony was producing between 20 and 25 titles a year.

Born and brought up in Hereford, Tony began as a television trainee in Bristol. He remained adept in this medium but was increasingly attracted to radio. He loved the craft of acting and the business of working out character with his actors, free from any ready-made visual likeness. These sessions were relaxed, jokey, talkative and friendly, according to Fiona Walker, who played in many of his productions. "Oh, and politically always a bit to the left."

Ironically, it was a leftwing extremist who presaged one of Tony's rare setbacks. The BBC's World Service was looking for more drama, preferably in the form of half-hour playlets which could be slipped in to the intervals between news bulletins. The Home Service wanted to stick to full-length, 90-minute plays. Tony dreamed up the idea of the drama triptych, whose equal parts could be broadcast separately or run together.

It so happened that I had already offered him an idea that lent itself to such a format – three little rituals as experienced by a teenage conscript in 1943-45, beginning with his "calling-up hop", or farewell dance in the village hall, which was also to feature in A Last Excuse Me Dance, a successful Radio 4 item broadcast on 28 January 2012.

In 1985 it had been part one of Ceremonies of War, and generally well received. Shooting itself in the foot in no uncertain manner, the BBC's own publication, the Listener, entrusted its review to a rabid Marxist critic who could not find the words, he said, to convey the badness of this wretched offering, and its outrageous suggestion that, as the fighting ended in Germany, in part three, German women might flee to the west to avoid rape by Russian soldiers. There were no further triptychs. Tony's own attitude to war was shaped by the death of his father, lost at sea during that same war.

His BBC career, finally reaching retirement in 2006, was effectively his only career. Tony was predeceased by a daughter, Lucy. He is survived by his third wife, Christine, five children and seven grandchildren.